I have mint 13 32bit on a CYBERMAX MD41257 (Medion) and it stops after the log in on the blank screen in 50% of start ups from cold. There is no response and the only option is to switch of and switch on then it boots normally.

It has a P4 CPU and has always been a pig when I had XP on it it failed to boot and BSD 50% of cold boots. The computer has been checked by a computer shop and it seems that everything is working as it should.

I was wondering if anyone had bad experiences with CYBERMAX or Medion computers. I had to renew the battery after just 2 years and now the new batery seems to be on its way out after only 14 months.

I used to have an old 15" LCD monitor that would only kick in half the time at login .. but if when it goes to a blank screen you turned off the monitor, then turned it back on, it would work.( I spent months turning the PC off before realising that)

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I forgot to mention that it is a laptop...... I do not think it is the screen as the key board is dead and there is no hard disk activity..

As I said it has always been a bit of a pig..... It used to overheat and shut-down this was traced to the battery that was not holding a charge, replacing the battery solved the overheating.

I exercise good battery management fully discharging and recharging every month and yet I noticed recently that the battery(only 14 months old) is only lasting for an hour when it is supposed to last 2.5 hours on high demand.

I tested the Hard disk and the RAM and all is in order. So it would seem that it is just a crap laptop.

Well if it's a laptop, and the HDD and RAM are known to be good, there's little else you can do.

Have you tried REISUB when it appears to be locked .. to see if it reboots ?

The reason I ask .. if REISUB works, then the system is active .. that's partly how I worked out it was my monitor, I thought it was frozen during the boot as all hard drive activity stopped, but in reality it had just finished booting.

Not that there's necessarily anything you can do if it's a laptop and it is the monitor.

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Forgot all about REISUB will try it next time it fails. It is possible to get a new screen from ebay but this laptop is extremely difficult to undo and replace components I had to have a shop upgrade the RAM as I just could not get the thing open.

If it is a screen issue a second-hand laptop would possible be the best option.

Errors during booting wil be at:-/var/log/boot.logbut be aware .. those are ONLY errors that don't stop the boot process .. ie. a kernel panic won't be logged, as it'll kill the system before it can be logged.

You might find more info in these/var/log/dmesgand/var/log/syslog

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Can you attach an external monitor to your laptop, just to prove that it has/not fully booted?Also changing the kernel line to verbose might give you some indication (that is if you get some display going)

I have been thinking if it could be something to do with the boot splash being black, maybe the video driver drops out sometimes I wanted to install a splash screen using " sudo update-alternatives --config default.plymouth" but I am told there are no alternatives so how do I install some?

OK I doubt if the lack of a bootscreen (if you mean the screen with the 5 dots) has anything to do with this.

That could probably be fixed by adding vga=791 to your kernel boot line.

is "Additional Drivers" not offering you any other graphics drivers ?

If I had to take a guess I'd go for

a) some kind of weird acpi issue .. try adding acpi_osi=Linux as a kernel boot parameter.b) failing hardware .. does the SMART data in Disk Manager report any errors ?c) screwed file system .. run: sudo touch /forcefsck then reboot, a file system check should be run during the next bootup.d) graphics driver issue .. but then I'd expect it to happen EVERY boot.